The Cleric Quintet: The Fallen Fortress

 

The imp ripped off a series of outcries, curses, and sput-terings against Aballister and against wizards in general.

Druzil had been caught in the edges of Aballister's storm, had been pelted by hail and nearly sizzled by a lightning blast Now the imp, cold and miserable, only wanted to get back to Castle Trinity. You could come out for me, Druzil telepathically asked.

I have not the energy, came Aballister's expected reply. Since you allowed Cadderly to get away, I was forced to take matters into my own hands. And still I have preparations before me, for the unlikely event that Cadderly or any of his foolish friends survived.

"Bene tellemara" the frustrated imp whispered under his breath. Now that Druzil believed he needed Aballister, he was careful to put up a blocking wall of innocuous thoughts so that the wizard would not hear the insult

Better that I am with you if Cadderly arrives, Druzil replied, trying to find some argument to change the stubborn wizard's mind. With his magic, powerful Aballister could teleport to Druzil's side, scoop the imp up, and put them both safely back in Castle Trinity in a matter of two minutes.

I told you that I was too weary, Aballister's casual thoughts came back - and Druzil understood that Aballister was simply punishing him. Better that you are with me? the wizard scoffed. I sent you on a most important mission, and you failed! Better to face Cadderly alone, I say, than with an unreliable and troublesome imp at my side. I do not yet know what happened to facilitate the destruction of the evil spirit, Druzil, but if I find that you were in any way involved, your punishment will not be pleasant.

More likely it was your own son, Druzil's mind growled back.

The imp felt a wave of unfocused mental energy, an anger so profound that Aballister had not taken the moment to give it a clear flow of words. Druzil knew that his reference once again to Cadderly as Aballister's son had struck a sensitive nerve, even though Aballister had apparently taken care of the problem.

You will seek out the bodies of Cadderly and his friends, Aballister answered. Then you will walk back to me, or flap those weak wings of yours when the wind permits! I'll tolerate little more from you, Druzil. 'Ware the next storm I send out to the mountains!

With that, Aballister promptly broke off the connection, leaving Druzil cold in the snow, pondering the wizard's last words.

Truly, the imp was disgusted by the ridiculous accusation and by Aballister's continual threats. He had to admit, though, that they carried some weight. Druzil could not believe the devastation Aballister had rained on Nightglow and the surrounding region. But Druzil was cold and miserable now, deep in the wintry mountains, and constantly had to shake the fast accumulating snow off his leathery wings.

He certainly didn't like where he was. but in a way, Druzil was relieved that Aballister had refused his request to bring him home. If indeed the young priest had somehow escaped Aballister's fury - and Druzil did not think that such an impossibility - then Druzil preferred to be far away when Aballister at last faced his son. Druzil had once battled Cadderly in menta! combat and had been overwhelmed. The imp had also fought against the woman, Danica, and had been defeated - even his poison had been ineffective against that one. Druzil's repertoire of tricks was fast emptying where the young priest was concerned.

The stakes were simply too high.

But these mountains! Druzil was a creature of the lower planes, a dark region mostly of black fires and thick smoke. He did not like the cold, did not like the wet feel of the wretched snow, and the glare of sunlight on the angled whitened surface of the mountain slopes pained his sensitive eyes. He had to go on, though, and would, eventually, have to return and face his wizard master.

Eventually.

Druzil liked the ring of that thought. He brushed the snow from his wings and gave a lazy flap to get him up into the air. He decided immediately that searching for Cadderly and his friends would be a foolhardy thing, and so he veered away from the settling mass of misplaced snow around Nightglow. Neither was his direction north, toward Castle Trinity. Druzil went east, the shortest route out of the Snowflakes, a course that would take him down to the farmlands surrounding Carradoon.

*****

"Prepare your defenses," Dorigen said as soon as she entered Aballister's room, unexpectedly and unannounced.

"What do you know?" growled the weary wizard.

"Cadderly lives!"

"You have seen him?" Aballister snapped, coming fast out of his chair, his dark eyes coming to life with an angry sparkle.

"No," Dorigen lied. "But there are still wards blocking my scrying. The young priest is very much alive."

Reacting in quite the opposite way Dorigen had expected, Aballister erupted in laughter. He slapped a hand on the arm of his chair and seemed almost giddy. Then he looked to his associate, and her incredulous expression asked many questions.

"The boy makes it enjoyable!" the old wizard said to her. "I have not faced such a challenge in decades!"

Dorigen thought that he had gone quite insane. You have never faced such a challenge, she wanted to scream at the man, but she kept that dangerous thought private. "We must prepare," she said again, calmly. "Cadderly is alive, and it might be that he escaped your fury because he was much closer than we anticipated."

Aballister seemed to sober at once, and turned his back at Dorigen, his skinny fingertips tapping together in front of him. "It was your scrying that led me to assail Night-glow," he pointedly reminded her.

"It was Druzil's guidance, more than my own," she quickly corrected, sincerely afraid to accept blame for anything, given Aballister's unpredictable, and incredibly dangerous, mood.

She sighed, noticing Aballister subtly nod his head in agreement

"Prepare..." she started to say a third time, but the wizard spun about suddenly, his scowl stealing the words from her mouth.

"Oh, we shall prepare!" Aballister hissed though gritted teeth. "Better for Cadderly if he had fallen to the storm!"

"I will instruct the soldiers," Dorigen said, and she turned for the door.

"No!" The word stopped the woman short. She slowly turned her head, to look back over her shoulder at Aballister.

"This is personal," Aballister explained, and he led Dori-gen's quizzical gaze across the room, to the swirling ball of mist hanging on the far wall, the entrance to Aballister's extradimensional mansion. "The soldiers will not be needed."

They looked down from a high perch to new battlements and a singular tower. From the outside, Castle Trinity did not seem so remarkable, or so formidable, even with the new construction that had been done. Vander, who had seen the tunnel networks beneath the rocky spur, assured them otherwise. Work on the new walls was slow now, with winter blowing thick, but guards were in abundance -  humans mostly - pacing predetermined routes and continually rubbing their hands together to ward away the icy breeze.

That is the main entrance," Vander explained, pointing to the central area of the closest wall. A huge door, oaken and ironbound, was set deep into the stone, enveloped by walkways and parapets and many soldiers. "Beyond that door is a cave entrance, barred by a portcullis, and a second, similar door. We will find guards, well-armed and well-trained, positioned every step of the way."

"Bah, we're not for going straight in the front door!" Ivan protested, and this time, the yellow-bearded dwarf found some allies for his grumbling. Danica readily agreed by reminding everyone that their only chance lay in stealth, and Shayleigh even suggested that perhaps they should have come out with Carradoon's army at their heels.

Cadderly hardly listened to the talk, trying to think of some magic that might get them in, but that would not overly tax his still-limited energies. His friends had remained optimistic, believing that he could handle the situation. Cadderly liked their confidence in him; he only wished that he shared it. That morning, leaving the cave, with the sky shining blue, Ivan had scoffed at the storm that had hit Nightglow, had called it a simple wizard's trick, and berated Aballister for not being able to aim straight

"First rule in shootin' magics!" the dwarf had bellowed. "Ye got to hit the damned target!"

"Oo oi!" Pikel had heartily agreed, and then the green-bearded dwarf, too, had made light of it all with a quiet, "Hee hee hee."

Cadderly knew better, understood the strength of the wizard's incredible display. The young priest still believed that he walked along the true path of Deneir, but images of Aballister's fury, slamming the mountain itself into surrender, stayed with him all morning.

He shook the unpleasant thoughts away and tried to focus on the situation at hand. "Is there another way in?" he heard Danica ask.

"At the base of the tower," Vander answered. "Aballister brought us... brought the Night Masks in that way, through a smaller, less guarded door. The wizard did not want the commoners of his force to know that he had hired the assassins."

Too much open ground," Danica remarked. The tower was set some distance behind the two nearly finished perpendicular walls, and though the tower, too, had apparently not been completed, it stood an imposing thirty feet high, with temporary battlements ringing its top. Even if the friends managed to get past the guards on the closest walls, just a couple of archers up in that tower could make life miserable for them.

"What tricks ye got to keep them off our backs while we make the run?" Ivan asked Cadderly, gruffly slapping the young priest on the shoulder to force him from his private contemplations.

"The shortest route would be from the right, from below the spur," he reasoned. "But that would leave us running uphill, vulnerable to many defensive measures. I say that we come in from the left, down the slope of the rocky spur and around the shorter wall."

That wall's guarded," Ivan argued.

Cadderly's wry smile ended the debate.

The friends spent the better part of the next hour in a roundabout hike to a point on the rocky spur far above Castle Trinity. With this new angle, around the side of the largest, frontal wall, they could see scores of soldiers, including large, hairy bugbears, ten-foot-tall ogres, and even a giant. Cadderly knew that this would be quite a test - for his friends' trust in him, and for his abilities. If that formidable force intercepted them before they got inside the back door, all would be lost

The tower was fully thirty yards back from the front wall and fully forty yards away from the outermost tip of the perpendicular wall, the wall they had to run around. Ivan shook his hairy head; Pikel added an occasional "Oo," showing that even the dwarves, the most battle-hardened members of the troupe, did not think the idea feasible.

But Cadderly remained undaunted; his smile had not ebbed an inch. The first volley will alert them - the second should get them into positions where we might get near the wall," he explained.

The others looked around to each other in confusion, their expressions incredulous. Most eyes centered on Shay-leigh's quiver and the hand-crossbow at Cadderly's side.

"On my cue, when the third volley of flaming pitch soars out for the front wall, we go for the tower," Cadderly went on. "You lead the charge," he said to Danica.

Danica, though she still had no idea of what "volleys" the young priest was talking about, smiled wryly, pleased that Cadderly would not patronize her, would not try to protect her when the situation obviously called for each of them to perform specific, and dangerous, tasks. Danica knew that not many men of Faerun would allow their beloved women to rush out into danger ahead of them, and it was Cadderly's implicit trust and respect of her which made her love him so very much.

"If the archers up above catch sight of us," Cadderly continued, aiming this remark at Shayleigh, "we will need you to cut them down,"

"What volley?" Shayleigh demanded, tired of the cryptic game. "What flaming pitch?"

Cadderly, already falling away, deep into his speUcasting concentration, didn't reply. In a moment, he was chanting, singing softly, and his friends hunched down and waited for the clerical magic to take effect

"Wow," muttered Pikel at the same moment that one of the guards along the front gate cried out in surprise. Balls of flaming pitch and large spears were appearing in midair, thundering down near the wall. Soldiers scrambled and dove from the gate; the giant hoisted a slab of stone and put it in front of him defensively.

It was over in just a few instants, with no fires left burning and no apparent damage to the stonework. The soldiers remained under cover, though, calling frantic orders and pointing out many potential artillery hiding places in the ridges beyond the gates.

Cadderly nodded to Danica, and she and Shayleigh began the procession from the side, slipping from stone to stone. The diversion had apparently worked thus far, for few guards seemed concerned with the high ground to the side of the walls.

The second illusory "volley" roared in farther down the front wall, well beyond the main gates, luring the enemy's attention to the vulnerable corner where the third wall would be built. As Cadderly had predicted, those soldiers along the side wall rushed into defensive positions behind the shielding, and thicker, front wall.

Again the explosions lasted only a few seconds, but the guards were in a near-panic now, huddled tight against the battlements and the base of the wall. Not a single eye turned to the southwest, to the higher ground from which the companions approached.

Danica and Shayleigh led them up to the now-abandoned perpendicular wall without incident, light-stepped along its base away from the front wall, and peered around to the empty courtyard.

Cadderly moved in front of the group and held his hand up to keep his friends back. He concentrated on the front wall and reached out to the particles of air about him, seeing their nature revealed in the notes of Deneir's song. Slowly and subtly, using triggering words and the energy of clerical magic, the young priest altered the composition of those particles, brought them together, thickened them.

A heavy mist swelled up around the front wall, and around the front half of the uncompleted courtyard.

"Go," Cadderly whispered to Danica, and he motioned for the dwarves to follow, and for Shayleigh to come into position where she could view the tower. Without hesitation, the brave monk ran off, zigzagging across the rough, frozen ground.

On impulse, Cadderly took Shayleigh's arrow from her hand. "Get it up on top of the tower," he instructed, casting an enchantment over it and handing it back.

Danica was twenty yards out, halfway to the tower, before anyone there noticed her. Three archers took up their bows and started to call out, when Shayleigh's arrow smacked solidly into the shoulder of one. The man went down in a heap; the other two went into a frenzy, their mouths wagging wide as they tried to cry out for their companions manning the front gate.

Not a sound came from the top of the tower, the area magically silenced by the enchanted arrow.

The remaining two enemy archers opened up on Danica, but her course was too erratic and her agility too great. Arrows skipped off the frozen ground, or snapped apart as they struck, but Danica, rolling and diving, cutting sharper angles than the soldiers could anticipate, never came close to being hit

"Hee nee nee," chuckled Pikel, running with Ivan far behind the monk and thoroughly enjoying the spectacle.

Shayleigh returned the fire with vicious accuracy, skipping arrows in between the parapet stones and forcing the guards to concentrate more on keeping their heads down than on firing at Danica. Still the men tried futilely to cry out, to warn their associates of the peril.

Vander scooped up Shayleigh, settled her atop his broad shoulders, and ran after the dwarves.

Cadderly focused once more on the front wall, loosing another illusory volley to ensure that the soldiers would remain tight in their holes. Smiling at his own cleverness, the young priest raced off after his friends.

As Danica reached the base of the tower, the door burst open and a swordsman rushed out to face her. Always alert, she rolled headlong and came up within his weapon's descending arc, the ball of her fist connecting under his chin and driving him away.

Above Danica, one of the archers leaned out, angling for a killing shot Shayleigh's arrow, loosed before he had even drawn his bow, sank deep into his collarbone.

The other archer, tight against the corner of a squared stone, responded with a shot that caught Vander in the chest, but the arrow did little to slow the giant Howling and growling, Vander yanked out the puny bolt and hurled it away.

Her angle improved by the fact that she was ten feet above the ground, Shayleigh smiled grimly and loosed another arrow. It skipped off the squared stone and ricocheted into the enemy archer's eye. The man fell back in agony, obviously screaming - but again, not a sound came from the enchanted area.

Ivan and Pikel disappeared into the tower behind Danica; Cadderly could see that there was some fighting within. The young priest ran with all speed, slipping in on Vander's heels, but by the time he, the firbolg, and the elf maiden got there, the five goblin guards of the tower's first floor were already dead.

Danica kneeled before another doorway across the small chamber, studying its lock. She pulled the clasp off of her belt and straightened it with her teeth, then gently slipped it in and began working it, side to side.

"Hurry," bade Shayleigh, standing by the outer door. Across the courtyard, cries of "Enemies in the tower!" could be heard. The elf maiden shrugged - the deception was no more - and leaned out the door, shooting off an arrow or two to keep the enemy forces back. One quiver empty, her second growing lighter, she regretted now her decision to join in the battle in the valley.

Cadderly pulled her in by the elbow and closed the door. It was an easy thing for the priest to magically reach into the essence of the wood, to swell it and warp it so that the portal was sealed tight. Vander piled the dead goblins against the door as added security, and again all eyes focused on Danica.

"Hurry," Shayleigh reiterated, her words taking on more weight as something heavy slammed against the tower door.

With a grin to her companions, Danica slipped her makeshift lockpick behind one ear and pushed op*n the door, revealing a descending stairway.

Cadderly looked at the passage curiously. "Not heavily guarded and not trapped?" he mused aloud.

"It was trapped," Danica corrected. She pointed to a wire along the side of the jamb, secured in place with the other part of her belt None of them had the time to admire the skilled monk's handiwork, though, for another, louder crash sounded on the outer door, and the tip of an axe blade poked through the wood.

Ivan and Pikel pushed ahead of Danica and rambled side by side down the stairs. Vander and Shayleigh went next, the firbolg using his innate magics to reduce himself to the size of a large man. Next came Cadderly, and then Danica, who turned back and, with a subtle twist of her pick, locked the door and rearmed the trap.

Another door blocked the way at the bottom of the stairs, but the dwarven brothers lowered their heads, locked arms, and picked up their pace.

"It may be warded!" Cadderly called out to them, understanding their intent

The Bouldershoulders blew through the door, a series of fiery explosions erupting on their heels as they tumbled down in the midst of shattered and smoking wood. The two had been fortunate indeed to get through the portal so quickly, for tiny darts protruded from both doorjambs, dripping poison. In the underground tunnels beyond the door, the blare of horns sounded - probably magical alarms, Cadderly thought

"What'd ye say?" Ivan yelled above the clamor, as the others came into the lower passage.

"Never mind," was all that Cadderly replied. His voice was grim, despite the sight of Pikel hopping all about, trying to put out wisps of smoke trailing from his heels and backside. The whole objective in coming to Castle Trinity with so small a force was to strike at the leaders of the enemy conspiracy, but that goal seemed unlikely now, with horns blaring and enemies beating at the closed doors behind them.

"Aw, come on and find a bit of fun!" Ivan bellowed at the obviously worried young priest "Hold on to me cloak, boy! ni get ye where ye want to go!"

"Oo oi!" Pikel piped in, and the brothers thundered away. They hit resistance before they even turned the first corner, and plowed through the surprised band of goblins with abandon, slaughtering and scattering the creatures.

"Which way?" Ivan called back, his words coming out at the end of a grunt as he drove his mighty axe through the backbone of one goblin that had turned to flee a split second too late. The torchlit corridor beyond the dead goblin showed several doors and at least two branching tunnels.

The friends looked to Cadderly, but the young priest shrugged helplessly, having no immediate answers amidst the sudden confusion. A series of explosions far behind them told Cadderly that their enemies had breached the second door - and had not been successful in disarming the trap.

Ivan kicked open the nearest door, revealing a huge room holding a battery of human archers and a group of giants at work leveling a ballista. "Not that way!" the gruff dwarf explained, quickly closing the door and rushing on.

In the wild run that followed, Cadderly lost all sense of direction. They passed through many portals, turned many corners, and clobbered many very surprised enemies. Soon they came to an area of better worked tunnels, with runes and bas reliefs of the teardrop symbols of Talona carved into their stone walls.

Cadderly looked to Vander, hoping that the firbolg might recognize some landmark, but Vander could not be sure.

A jolt of electricity threw Pikel back from the next door. Ivan growled and hit the portal shoulder-first, bursting through into yet another long and narrow corridor, this one lined by tapestries depicting the Lady of Poison, smiling evilly as though she clearly saw the intruders. Resilient Pikel, the hairs of his green beard dancing free of the (|ght braid, joined his brother in an instant

Twenty steps in, the group was enveloped by a ball of absolute darkness.