Son of Thunder - Murray J. D. Leeder [108]
Vell delved deeper into his lizard-tainted soul, and found a place he had never imagined.
* * * * *
Clavel Foxgray stood on the city walls of Llorkh surveying the terrain, holding his hand above his eyes as shelter from the cold wind. His purple robe fluttered in the breeze. Clavel avoided looking down at the ditch, the ugly scar on the earth that encircled the city, all the more terrible for anyone who had spent a night sleeping in it.
Nobody ever jeered him for being knocked into the ditch by that hobgoblin. But on that dreadful drunken night in the Wet Wizard, two of his colleagues taught him something when they had to beat sense into him-sense enough to keep his mouth shut about Ardeth.
The low rising sun was at Clavel's back, and as he stared west, the shadow of the wall crawled across the land. The strange and unsettling night, with those huge lizards wailing their lungs out, had left him shaken, and he was happy that it would soon be over.
Through the whistling wind, he could swear he heard a strange sound in the distance-a repetitive pounding. It triggered a faint recollection from his childhood, when the mines around Llorkh were still active, and their sounds echoed across the land. Now they were closed and gone.
Somehow Clavel was reminded of another night, too, when he had also stood on these walls. It was in the month of Ches in the Year of Wild Magic, when the phaerimm had emerged from their underground prison near Evereska. It seemed all the lands west of Anauroch were suddenly alive with danger, with strange monsters enslaving humanoid tribes to accomplish their foul objectives. An army of bugbears appeared out of the Graypeaks to march against Llorkh, led by a beholder. That day, with his city under siege, the walls on the verge of collapse, and bugbear corpses filling the ditch, he felt something unexpected. For a moment, part of him wanted the city to fall. He wanted the whole sad saga of Llorkh to come to an end. A good end, a bad end, it didn't matter. Just an end.
Only for a moment, Clavel felt that way once again.
* * * * *
As Geildarr slept in his luxurious feather bed within the oak-paneled splendor of his bedroom, the Heart of Runlatha clapped to his breast, the glowing red energies of the artifact crept forth and invaded his dreaming mind.
He dreamed he was in Netheril in its last days, walking the streets of Runlatha by night. He was calm, though the world around him was crumbling. The black waters of the vanished Narrow Sea trembled under a heavy breeze. The city buildings were not only damaged by war, but they seemed somehow colorless and stripped of something vital. Clearly they had once been fantastic feats of architecture, but now they were broken and decayed. Bodies were piled in the street, both human and orc. The place stank of rotting flesh, and cries of anguish filled the air. In the distance, smoke plumes rose to the sky.
The magic is gone, Geildarr knew. This is after Karsus's folly, when the greatest arcanist of Netheril-the most powerful and most foolish wizard Faerun had ever known-had cast an avatar spell to kill the goddess of magic, hoping to gain her power.
Instead, Geildarr recalled, Karsus destroyed all of the arcane magic in the world, sending all the sky citadels of High Netheril tumbling to the ground. Though Runlatha was part of Low Netheril, it too probably had much magic woven into its very structure-magic that failed the moment Karsus cast his spell. Without the protection of the citadels, Runlatha was vulnerable to the masses of humanoid hordes.
Even without Karsus's folly, the Great Desert was spreading, ruining farmland throughout what was once the heart of Netheril. From his own studies of history, Geildarr had decided that the fall of the Empire of Magic was inevitable, one way or another. Karsus merely hastened it.
"We must abandon