Finder's Stone - Song Of The Saurials Part 22

"But you had Mist with you!" Alias declared, referring to the ancient red dragon who had helped Dragonbait and Akabar battle the Darkbringer.

"And now we have Grypht," Dragonbait countered. "His apprentices often call him the old lair beast," the paladin added with a smile. "That's what we call Mist's kind on our world."

He could smell Alias's fear and anxiety, and he understood why she was terrified of the evil G.o.d. Of all the masters who had tried to enslave her, Moander was the only one whose command she'd been unable to resist, the only one who had captured her unaided, the only one whose defeat she had not been a part of.

"Maybe you should find Nameless and stay behind with him," Dragonbait suggested.

Alias lowered her head, ashamed of her cowardice, struggling to fight it. "No ... I want to help you," she said, but she began shivering in the warm sunlight, and her eyes began to glaze over.

Dragonbait grabbed the swordswoman's shoulders, alarmed by her expression, afraid she might faint, but instead she seemed to fall into a trance and started repeating, over and over, the same words she had spoken last evening. "We are ready for the seed. Where is the seed? Find the seed. Bring the seed" This time, though, her words were accompanied by a myriad of scents that rose from her body, communicating a plethora of conflicting emotionsa"excitement and fear, joy and anguish, impatience and dread, determination and resignation, pride and remorse. Dragonbait realized at once that it had all the earmarks of a true saurial song.

"High One," Dragonbait shouted, "come quickly!"

Grypht came running up to the paladin. "What is it?" he asked.

"Listen to her song," Dragonbait insisted.

Grypht stared at Alias and furrowed his brow, confused by her trance and the words she spoke. "What seed?" he asked. "What is she singing about?"

"Shh. There's another verse," Dragonbait said.

"Nameless is found," Alias said in Saurial. "Nameless must join us. Nameless will find the seed. Nameless will bring the seed."

"He will, will he?" Grypht muttered.

The scents rising from the swordswoman's body sent an eerie shiver down Dragonbait's spine, frightening him far more than the earlier songs of Nameless that Alias had twisted.

Suddenly Alias stopped her saurial chant. Then, just as she had done the night before, she held out her hand, with her forefinger pointing downward, and traced a circle parallel to the ground.

"The saurial sign of death," Grypht whispered.

Alias screamed and began to shout in Realms common, "No! No! No!"

When Alias screamed, Breck Orcsbane, who had been seated by the fire toasting bread with Akabar and Zhara, leaped to his feet immediately. He ran through the clearing to the swords-woman's side, his sword drawn and pointed at Grypht's midsection. "What's going on here?" he demanded. "Alias, are you all right? What have you done to her?" he shouted at Grypht.

Akabar and Zhara came up behind the ranger, equally concerned for the swordswoman, though less inclined to blame Grypht. Akabar stepped between the wizard and Breck's sword.

Alias snapped out of her trance. She gasped and looked around in confusion.

"Alias? What is it?" Akabar asked. "What's wrong?"

"I just had a ... a bad dream," she said. "It was something about Nameless." She paused, concentrating hard, but whatever it was, she couldn't remember now.

"First you walk in your sleep, now you dream when you're wide awake," Breck growled. "What manner of curse are you under?"

"I do not walk in my sleep," Alias snapped.

"You did last night. Ask Dragonbait if you don't believe me," Breck replied.

Alias looked at Dragonbait, and the paladin nodded.

"It sounded as if you were singing a saurial soul song," Grypht said. "But how can that be?" the wizard asked Dragonbait. "She's not a saurial."

"What's a soul song?" Alias asked in saurial.

"Her soul and spirit are bound by magic to my own, High One," Dragonbait explained to Grypht.

"But you haven't received the gift of soul singing," Grypht said, still confused.

"My mother had the gift, High One," Dragonbait reminded the wizard.

"That's right... so she did." Grypht nodded, remembering.

"Would someone please tell me what a soul song is?" Alias asked again.

Grypht clapped his hands once and bounced on his heels. "This is marvelousa"even better than the magic stone. If she sings what our people know, she will be our eyes and ears in the enemy's camp."

"What are they talking about?" Breck asked Alias. Although he was unable to follow any of the conversation in saurial, the ranger recognized Grypht's excitement.

Alias waved Breck silent and shouted in saurial, "What is a soul song?"

"A song of our people that reflects our tribe's state of being," Grypht explained calmly. "When a singer of a soul song sings, her mind opens up to what is within the souls of her tribe, and she sings their song. Sometimes when she sleeps, she often dreams their dreams and wakes singing their song. The song will change as the tribe's condition changes. It may be a song of joy or contentment, which we accept with pleasure, or it may be a song of grief, which we learn to bear. When it is a song of evil, though, we must acta"fight the evil, whether it conies from without or within, until the song grows good again. Because our tribe is controlled by Moander, the tribe knows much anguish, but it also knows of the Darkbringer's plans. You probably have just been singing of those plans. I hope you can do it again. Something opened your mind to the souls of our tribe and you began to sing. What was it? What were you thinking about before you went into the trance?"

Alias's brow furrowed. "I... I don't remember."

"Your fear of Moander," Dragonbait said.

Alias lowered her eyes, embarra.s.sed, then it occurred to her that this soul-singing trance could explain her other problem. "That must be why I've been singing Nameless's songs differently. I've been turning them into soul songs."

"It is very likely," Dragonbait agreed.

"Dragonbait, if you knew what was happening, why didn't you try to tell me what was wrong?" Alias asked the paladin.

"I only started to suspect last night," Dragonbait said, "when you sang in saurial. At least, you tried to sing, but your words had no feeling, since you hadn't the power to produce scents. Just now when you sang, it was much more obvious that it was a soul song."

"Would someone please explain what is going on?" Breck demanded, frustrated beyond endurance at not being able to understand the swordswoman's conversation with the saurials.

Alias explained everything that Grypht and Dragonbait had just told her. "So," she said in conclusion, staring pointedly at Akabar and Zhara, "I was right after all. I knew I wasn't singing the songs wrong because of the G.o.ds."

"Actually," Dragonbait said, "our people believe that soul singing is a gift of the G.o.ds."

Alias didn't bother to translate the paladin's correction. "You said I sang about Moander's plans. What did I sing? I have no recollection of it whatsoever."

Grypht quoted the lyrics of the first verse of Alias's soul song. "'We are ready for the seed. Where is the seed? Find the seed. Bring the seed.'"

"What seed?" Alias asked.

"We don't know," Grypht said. "Obviously it is something Moander wants very badly, and he thinks Nameless will bring it to him. The second verse of your song went, 'Nameless is found. Nameless must join us. Nameless will find the seed. Nameless will bring the seed.'"

"And then you screamed," Dragonbait interjected.

"Yes!" Alias exclaimed, suddenly remembering what had made her scream out in fear. "Nameless is in terrible danger! We must find him before it's too late! Moander is trying to turn him into one of its minions!"

Olive shifted in her sleep from one uncomfortable position to another. Somewhere far overhead, birds started to chirp loudly. Olive came half awake, but from the back of her mind came a reminder that she didn't want to be awake, so she kept her eyes closed and ignored the birds. A beam of sunlight struck her face. Olive drew her hood up over her eyes. Then her stomach rumbled.

"d.a.m.n!" the halfling grumbled. She glared up angrily at the well shaft overhead, which taunted her with its inaccessibility. If only it had been nearer a wall, they could escape. She was experienced at climbing walls. Unfortunately, she couldn't hang from ceilings, and the well came out in the center of the ceiling. She sat up and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

"Stupid well!" she muttered, rummaging through her knapsack. There wasn't any fruit left. She and Finder had finished it off last night. Buried in the bottom of the knapsack, she found three stale sweet rolls. She left two for the bard and took one for herself, nibbling at it slowly as she studied the excavation Finder had begun last night.

The bard had climbed to the top of the pa.s.sageway wall, where he had dug into the dirt and pounded at the stone with Olive's broken shovel until he'd created a second shaft in the ceiling. It was all of four feet deep. He'd finally slipped down from the wall, frustrated and exhausted. In the morning light, Olive judged the old well shaft to be at least fifty feet deep. She estimated it would take about a week for one man and a half-ling to dig that far straight up. Finder was trying to angle his shaft toward the well shaft, hoping to connect with it so they could climb out the rest of the way through the well. Since the well shaft was only twenty feet from Finder's shaft, digging to it should only take days . . . days without water or food.

Olive crept over to the corner where Finder lay sleeping. He slept like the dead, heavy and still. Asleep, the power of his voice and the animation of his face were not apparent, and he looked far older. Once he'd been lord of the ruined manor house somewhere above them, commanding the respect of his peers and the worship of his apprentices. Now he was curled up like a corpse, buried alive by his own magical horn.

Olive studied his face and hands carefully. There were no signs of vegetation growing out of his ears or his wrists. There was no hint of green in his skin. Maybe Finder had been right and his clothing had protected him from whatever had burst out of the burr.

Something clattered in the pa.s.sage behind Olive. The halfling swung around with her dagger drawn. Pebbles were rolling from the top of the fresh wall of dirt created when Olive had collapsed the ceiling. Something was shifting inside the pile.

Olive knelt beside the bard and shook his shoulder frantically. "Finder!" she whined.

Finder groaned and looked up groggily at the halfling. "Go 'way," he growled.

"Finder, something's trying to get in by digging through the cave-in!" Olive whispered urgently.

The bard sat up and reached for Olive's sword, which he'd been using as a dagger.

A large rock tumbled down the pile, and a muck-encrusted vine as thick as Olive's arm slithered out from where the rock had been. It rose up like an angry snake, and they could see that there was a mouth at its tipa"a lipless maw full of rows of sharp fangs. Olive had seen just such a growth before on Moander's body in the Realms.

"Nameless," the mouth called out. It spoke in the same grating, high-pitched voice as Xaran.

Finder rose to his feet and approached the vine carefully. "Is that you, Xaran?" he asked, halting a few feet from the mouth.

The vine twisted so that the mouth faced the bard. "You will do Moander's bidding whether you choose to or not. It is only a matter of time," the vine mouth said.

"You are mistaken," Finder said heatedly. "Moander tried to pervert my singer. I will never deal with the Darkbringer."

"In time, you will return even your precious singer to Moander," the vine mouth said.

"You can go to h.e.l.l!" Finder snarled. He slashed out with Olive's sword and sliced the mouth off the end of the vine. The vine whipped around his sword arm. Finder tried to pull it loose with his other hand, but twinelike tendrils flared out from the vine and lashed his hands together at the wrists.

Olive leaped forward, slashing with her dagger, and hacked through the vine near where it came out of the pile of rubble. What was left of the vine retreated back into the debris. The tendrils wrapped around Finder's arms went limp, but Olive had to help the bard free himself from them.

"Well, that was heartening," Finder said glibly.

"What was heartening?" Olive asked incredulously. "That Xaran is still alive waiting to grab you and turn you into a vegetable?"

"No," Finder said. "what was heartening was that Xaran used a tendril to slither in here, instead of simply disintegrating this pile of rubble. It must have injured its disintegrating eye."

"Great. Since you stabbed its central eye, now it has only nine more to use on us," Olive said.

"Eight. The eye that charms beasts will be useless against us," Finder reminded the halfling. "And I imagine both of us have the will to resist the eye that causes sleep."

"Oh . .. now I feel better," Olive said sarcastically. "There are only seven ways left for it to kill or capture me."

"Xaran doesn't have any hands to dig himself out, but we do," Finder said.

"But Xaran can put out another tendril and strangle us in our sleep," Olive protested.

"We'll just have to keep watch."

Olive heard a shout, as if from far away. She silenced the bard with a wave of her hand and listened hard. In a few seconds, there was another shout.

"Orcs!" the halfling said in panic. "There are still orcs alive out there! They'll dig Xaran out, then come in after us! Then what?"

"A good question," the bard muttered. "A good question indeed."

The Mouth of Moander peered into her scrying pool at the Nameless Bard and his halfling companion. It was only a matter of time before they were recaptured, but Moander didn't allow her to take her eyes off them. Last night, the high priestess had felt a rare moment of pleasure and hope when the bard's dagger had survived Xaran's disintegration ray and destroyed the beholder's central eye, and she had dared to gloat over her master's setback when the bard had felled the orcs and ruined their warren with his magical horn. Now the evil G.o.d kept the priestess's eyes fixed on the bard, savoring her fresh despair.

Coral wished fervently that she was standing at the top of the well with a rope to help the bard escape. Since the priestess had been unable to scry Akabar this morning, presumably because he'd rejoined the protected Alias, Moander was now relying on Nameless to locate the Turmishman. Without Nameless's help, the search for Akabar could go on far too long, increasing the risk that someone would find the hiding place of the G.o.d's new body, perhaps even someone with power enough to destroy the body and free the possessed saurials.

Moander forced Coral to speak the very words it used to taunt her. "Even if the bard could fly out of that trap, he cannot escape the Darkbringer now. The seeds of possession grow in him," the G.o.d declared through Coral's mouth.

"No!" Coral insisted. "Xaran's spores exploded hours ago, and the bard still shows no signs of possession. He has resisted your evil seeds."

"No, he hasn't," Moander forced Coral to say. "The seeds are simply taking longer to grow within him because he is human and such a large man."

"You lie!" Coral shouted in anger. "You lie to torture me!"

"Do I? We shall see," Moander said via the priestess's voice, and the Darkbringer made Coral laugh the high-pitched cackle of the insane.

14.

The Rescue

Alias held the finder's stone at arm's length and thought of Nameless again. Once more the stone sent out a beacon of light to the southwest.

"You know these lands," Akabar said to Breck Orcsbane. "What places where the bard might be fall along the beacon's path?"

Breck whistled softly. "He could be practically anywherea" Spiderhaunt Woods, Shadow Gap, Gnoll Pa.s.s, Cormyr. They all lie in that direction," the ranger replied. "If you or Grypht could teleport us to another place, we could use the stone to triangulate and get a better fix."