The Cleric Quintet: The Fallen Fortress

 

Screaming in terror and in pain, the young priest twirled up to his knees and pulled the bandolier over his head. Apparently thinking that the battle had turned his way, Abailister paid Cadderly's frantic movements no heed, was deep in the throes of casting another spell.

Cadderly put the flaming bandolier into a few quick spins over his head like a lasso and hurled it across the room, diving for cover as he threw, curling up in a fetal position with his hands tucked behind his head.

Abailister screamed in shock and fear, and the dragon roared as the first of the magical darts exploded.

One after another, the tiny bombs went off, each blast seeming louder than the one before. Metal tips and ends of the darts whipped about the room, pinging off metal bars, ricocheting off stone walls, and smashing glass.

Cadderly could not count the explosions, but he knew that he still had well over thirty darts in his bandolier. He tightened his arms instinctively about his head, continued to scream if for no better reason than to block out the terrible tumult in the room.

And then it was over, and Cadderly dared to look out. Residual sparking fires had been lit all about the huge room. The dragon lay dead, its torso shredded by many flying darts, but the wizard was nowhere to be seen.

Cadderly had started to stand when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a giant snake slipping out of the broken side of a glass container. He put his walking stick in the constrictor's face, held it back until he could quick-step past

A metal pole to the other side disintegrated in a flash of light. Another followed suit, and Cadderly began to understand that he had inadvertently unlocked the bindings of this entire magical pocket.

The young priest rushed across the room, through the far door, and into another, narrower corridor. The wizard stood forty feet away, one arm limp at his side, blood oozing from his shoulder, and his face blackened with soot

"Fool!" Aballister yelled at him. "You have broken my house, but have damned yourself in its collapse!"

It was true, Cadderly realized. The magical bindings were unraveling. He started to reply, but Aballister wasn't listening. The wizard scurried through a nearby door and was gone.

Cadderly ran up and tried to follow, but the heavy wooden door would not budge. There came another explosion, and the floor bucked violently, knocking him to one knee. He glanced frantically up and down the corridor, looking for some escape; he grabbed up his crossbow, only to remember that he had no more explosive darts.

Glaring light flickered through the open door he had left behind - the light of disintegrating material, Cadderly knew. He tried to fall into his magic, to search the song for a way out.

A flash ran along the ceiling above him, leaving a wide crack in its wake, and Cadderly realized that he did not have time.

He took up his adamantite spindle-disks and looped the cord over his finger. He sent them into a few fast movements, running them down to the end of the cord, then snapping them back into his palm, to tighten the cord.

"I hope you made these good," he mumbled, speaking as if Ivan Bouldershoulder were standing next to him. With a determined grunt, the young priest hurled the spindle-disks at the door, and they cracked off the wood, knocking a deep dent in its surface. A flick of Cadderly's wrist sent them spinning back to his hand, and he hurled them again, at the same spot

The third throw popped a hole in the wood and a fierce wind filled with red stinging dust assaulted Cadderly. He kept his balance and his composure and whacked the door again, his spindle-disks widening the hole.

The flickering light to his side became continuous, and Cadderly glanced that way to see the very corridor disSolv-ing, arcing fingers of electricity leading the way toward him, breaking apart the magically created stone so that it might be consumed.

Barely twenty feet away loomed nothingness.

Cadderly's weapon hit the door with all his strength behind it. He couldn't even see through the stinging dust, just flailed away desperately.

Ten feet away, the corridor was gone.

Cadderly sensed it, hurled the disks one final time, and threw all his weight against the weakened door.

Danica and Dorigen worked their way past scores of swarming Trinity soldiers, men and monsters alike. Many stopped to regard the fierce monk curiously, but seeing Dorigen beside Danica, they only shrugged and went on their way.

Danica knew that Dorigen could have had her overwhelmed with a single word at any time, and she spent more time looking at the wizard than at the scrambling soldiers, trying to figure out exactly what was motivating Dorigen.

They heard the firbolg's roar from beyond as they came up on one corner, heard the wind-cutting sweep of Vander's great sword and the frantic cries of dodging enemies. A goblin rushed around the bend, skidding to a stop right before Dorigen.

"Three of 'ems is down!" it shrieked, holding four crooked fingers up before it. Three of 'ems is down!" A sickly feeling washed over Danica. Three of 'ems is down!"

The goblin's smile disappeared under the weight of Dan-ica's fast-flying fist

"We have a truce," Dorigen calmly reminded the volatile monk, but it seemed to Danica that Dorigen was not overly concerned, was even amused, by the wounded goblin squirming about on the floor.

Danica was up to the corner in an instant, peering around at the sight she feared to view. Ivan, Pikel, and Shayleigh lay helpless on the floor, with Vander, showing a dozen grievous wounds, straddling them, the firbolg's huge sword working back and forth furiously to keep the multitude of pressing enemies back.

An ore cried out something Danica did not understand, and the enemy troops broke ranks, rushing away from the firbolg, rushing past Danica and turning, diving, into the corridor behind her. She understood the retreat when the scene cleared, revealing a battery of crossbowmen down the hall beyond the firbolg, weapons leveled and ready.

Vander cried out in protest, apparently realizing his doom. Then a glowing apparition of a hand appeared behind him, touched him, and he swung about, his sword cutting nothing but the empty air.

Danica's first reaction was to spin and clobber the wizard, guessing that Dorigen must have been the one who had brought forth the spectral hand, and fearing what the wizard might have done to Vander. Before the monk moved, though, the crossbow battery opened up, launching a score of heavy bolts Vander's way.

They skipped and deflected harmlessly off the firbolg. Some stopped in midair, quivering before Vander, then fell, their momentum expended, to the ground.

"I am true to my word," Dorigen said dryly, walking past Danica and into the open corridor. She called for Vander to be at ease, called for her own troops to cease the fighting. Some soldiers, ores mostly, near Danica eyed the monk dangerously, clutching their weapons as though they did not understand and did not trust the strange events.

The soldiers who had accompanied the monk and Dorigen from the wizard's area, who had witnessed Dorigen's fury against the ore that had gone against her commands, sent a line of whispers spreading throughout the ranks, and Danica soon relaxed, the threat apparently ended. She rushed around the corner, found Vander, too, slumping against the wall, thoroughly exhausted and gravely wounded.

"It is over?" the firbolg asked breathlessly.

"No more fighting," Danica answered. Vander closed his eyes and slid slowly down to the floor, and it seemed to Danica that he would die.

Danica found the dwarves and Shayleigh alive, at least, and Shayleigh actually managed to sit up and raise one hand in greeting. Ivan was by far the worst off of the three. He had lost a lot of blood and was losing more even as Danica tried futilely to stem the flow. Even worse, his legs had gone perfectly limp and were without feeling.

"Have you any healers?" Danica asked of Dorigen, who was standing over her.

"The clerics are all dead," a nearby soldier answered for the wizard, his words sharp-edged as he, too, tended to a wounded man, a Trinity soldier fast slipping into the realm of death.

Danica winced, remembering Cadderly's brutal work against that group, thinking it terribly ironic that his necessary actions against Trinity's priests might now cost his friends their lives.

Cadderly! The word assaulted Danica as surely as would an enemy spear. Where was he? she wondered. The potentially disastrous consequences of his showdown against Aballister, his father, rang clearer to the monk now, with Ivan cradled helplessly in her arms. Shayleigh seemed stronger with every passing moment; Vander's cuts had already clotted and were somehow mysteriously on the mend; and Pikel groaned and grumbled, finally rolling over with a curious, "Huh?"

But Ivan... Danica knew that only his dwarven toughness was keeping him alive, doubted that even that considerable strength would support him for much longer. Ivan needed a priest who could access powerful spells of healing - Ivan needed Cadderly.

Dorigen ordered several men to assist Danica in her efforts, sent several others to the priests' private quarters to search for bandages and healing potions and salves. None of the men, standing in the blood of their own allies, seemed overly eager to aid the brutal intruders, but none dared to disobey the wizard.

Danica, pressing hard against a pumping wound in Ivan's chest, her armed soaked with blood, could only wait and pray.

The small sun shone red. The air was hazy with swirling dust, and the rocky, barren landscape ranged from orange hues to deep crimson. All was quiet, save for the endless, mournful call of the gusting, stinging wind.

Cadderly saw no Me about him, no plants or animals, no sign even of water, and he couldn't imagine anything surviving in this desolate place. He wondered where he was and knew only that this barren region was nowhere on the surface of Toril.

"No place that has any name," Aballister answered the young priest's unspoken question. The wizard walked out from a nearby tumble of boulders and stood facing Cadderly. "At least none that I have ever heard."

Cadderly took some comfort in the feet that he could still hear Deneir's song playing in his mind. He began to sing along, quietly, his hand with the magical ring clenched at his side.

"I would be very careful before attempting any spells," Aballister warned, guessing his intent. "The properties of magic are not the same here as they are on our own world. A simple line of fire" - the wizard looked to the ring as he spoke - "might well engulf this entire planet in a ball of flame.

"It is the dust, you see," the wizard continued, holding his hand up into the wind, then folding his long, skinny fingers to rub against the red powder in his palm. "So volatile."

Aballister's sincere calm bothered the young priest.

"Your extradimensional home is no more," Cadderly said, trying to steal the wizard's bluster.

Aballister frowned. "Yes, dear Cadderly, you have become such a bother. It will take me many months to reconstruct that magnificent work. It was magnificent, don't you agree?"

"We are stranded." It was spoken as a statement, but Cadderly, fearful that his words might be true, privately intended it as a question.

Aballister's face screwed up incredulously, as though he thought the claim absurd. Cadderly took comfort in that, for if the wizard possessed some magic that would get them home, the young priest believed that Deneir would show him the way, as well.

"You are not a traveler," Aballister remarked, and he shook his head, seeming almost disappointed. "I never would have guessed that you would become so paralyzed by the comforts of that miserable library."

Now it was Cadderly who screwed up his face. What was the man saving? He never would have guessed? What revelations lay in the wizard's choice of words, his choice of tense?

"Who are you?" Cadderly asked suddenly, without thinking, without even meaning to speak the thought aloud.

Aballister's burst of laughter mocked him. "I am one who has lived many more years than you, who knows more about you than you believe, and who has defeated men and monsters much greater than you," the wizard boasted, and again his tone reflected sincere serenity.

"You may have done me a favor with your stubborn determination and your surprising resourcefulness," Aballister went on. "Both Barjin and Ragnor, my principle rivals, are dead because of you, and Dorigen as well, I would guess, since you came into my home alone."

"Dorigen showed me the way in," Cadderly corrected, more interested in deflating Aballister than in protecting the woman. "She is very much alive."

For the first time, Aballister seemed truly bothered, or at least perplexed. "She would not appreciate your telling me of her treachery," he reasoned. He started to elaborate, but stopped suddenly, feeling an intrusion in his thoughts, a presence that did not belong.

Cadderly pressed the domination spell, the same one he had used to "convince" Dean Thobicus to allow him to head out for Castle Trinity. He focused on the area of blackness he knew to be Aballister's identity, sent forth a glowing ball of energy to assault the wizard's mind.

Aballister stopped the glowing ball and pushed it back toward the young priest. How easily you work around the limitations of our physical surroundings, the wizard congratulated telepathically. Though you prove yourself a fool to challenge me so!

Cadderly ignored the message, pressed on with all his mental strength. The glowing ball of mental energy seemed to distort and flatten, moving not at all, as Aballister stubbornly pushed back.

You are strong, the wizard remarked.

Cadderly held similar feelings for his adversary. He knew his focus on the ball was absolute, and yet Aballister held him at bay. The young priest understood the synaptic movements of Aballister's thoughts, the clear flow of reasoning, the desperation of curiosity, and it seemed to Cadderly almost as if he was looking into some sort of mental mirror. They were so similar, the two opponents, and yet so different!

Cadderly's mind began to wander, began to wonder how many people of Faerun might possess similar mental powers, a similar synaptic flow. Very few, he believed, and that led him to begin calculating the probabilities of this meeting....

The glowing ball, the mental manifestation of pure pain, leaped his way, and Cadderly dismissed the tangent thoughts, quickly regaining his focus. The struggle continued for many moments, with neither man gain'Tng any advantage, neither man willing to relinquish an inch to the other.

It is of no avail, came Aballister's thoughts.

Only one will leave this place, Cadderly replied.

He pressed on, again making no headway. But then Cadderly began to hear the melody of the song of Deneir, flowing along beside him, falling into place near him and then within him. These were the notes of perfect harmony, sharpening Cadderly*s focus to a point where the unbelieving wizard could not follow. Aballister's mind might have been Cadderly's equal, but the wizard tacked the harmony of spirit, lacked the company of a god figure. Aballister had no answers for the greatest questions of human existence, and therein lay his weakness, his self-doubts.

The glowing ball began to move toward the wizard, slowly, but inevitably.

Cadderly felt Aballister's welling panic, and that only scattered the wizard's focus even more.

Do you not know who I am? the wizard telepathically asked. The desperation in his thoughts made Cadderly believe the words to be another pointless boast, a fervent denial that anyone could hope to defeat him in mental combat. The young priest was not distracted, maintained his focus and the pressure - until Aballister played his trump.

"I am your father!" the wizard screamed.

Hie words slammed into Cadderly more profoundly than any lightning bolt. The glowing ball was no more, the mental contact shattered by the overwhelming surprise. It all made sense to the young priest Awful, undeniable sense, and after viewing the wizard's thought processes, so similar, even identical, to his own, Cadderly could not find the strength to doubt the claim.

I am your father! The words rang out in Cadderly's mind, a damning cry, a pang of loneliness and regret for those things that might have been.

"Do you not remember?" the wizard asked, and his voice sounded so very sweet to the stunned young priest.

Cadderly blinked his eyes open, regarded the man and his unthreatening, resigned pose.

Aballister crooked his arms as though he were cradling a baby. "I remember holding you close," he cooed. "I would sing to you - how much more precious you were to me since your mother had died in childbirth!"

Cadderly felt the strength draining from his legs.

"Do you remember that?" the wizard asked gently. "Of course you do. There are some things ingrained deeply within our thoughts, within our hearts. You cannot forget those moments we had together, you and I, father and son."

Aballister's words wove a myriad of images in Cadderly's mind, images of his earliest days, the serenity and security he had felt in his father's arms. How wonderful things had been for him then! How filled with love and perfect harmony!

"I remember the day I was forced to give you up," Aballister purred on. His voice cracked; a tear streamed down his weary old face. "So vividly, I remember. Time has not dulled the edge of that pain."

"Why?" Cadderly managed to stammer.

Aballister shook his head. "I was afraid," he replied. "Afraid that I alone could not give you the life you deserved."

Cadderly felt only compassion for the man, had forgiven Aballister before the wizard had even asked for forgiveness.

"All of them were against me," Aballister went on, his voice taking on an unmistakable edge - and to Cadderly, the sharpness of the wizard's rising anger only seemed to validate all that Aballister had claimed. "The priests, the officials of Carradoon. 'It will be better for the boy/ they all said, and now I understand their reasoning."

Cadderly looked up and shrugged, not following the logic.

"I would have become the mayor of Carradoon," Aballister explained. "It was inevitable. And you, my legacy, my heart and soul, would have followed suit My political rivals could not bear to see that come to pass, could not bear to see the family of Bonaduce attain such dominance. Jealousy drove them, drove them all!"

It all made perfect sense to the stunned young priest He found himself hating the Edificant Library, hating Dean Thobicus, the old liar, and hating even Headmaster Avery Schell, the man who had served as his surrogate father for so many years. Pertelope, too! What a phony she had been! What a hypocrite!

"And so I have risen against them," Aballister proclaimed. "And I have searched you out. We are together again, my son."

Cadderly closed his eyes, put his head down, and absorbed those precious words, words he had wanted to hear from his earliest recollections. Aballister continued talking, but Cadderly's mind remained locked on those six sweet words. We are together again, my son.

His mother had not died in childbirth.

Cadderly did not really remember her, just in images, flashes of her smiling face. But those images certainly did not come from Cadderly's moment of childbirth.

And I have searched you out.