The Spectral Blaze Read online

  THE HAUNTED LANDS

  The story of a vicious civil war fraught with fell magic and the most disturbing undead that acclaimed horror author Richard Lee Byers could dream up.

  All right, human. I’ll tell you what you want to know.

  In primordial times dragons ruled Faerûn. The problem was that we were as contentious a people then as we are now. Yet if we had simply set about slaughtering our fellows whenever we felt so inclined, the resulting chaos might have brought us to the brink of extinction.

  Fortunately our ancestors found a way to manage the struggle. They vied for dominance by manipulating lesser beings like pawns on a game board, and scored points when their agents eliminated the minions of a rival.

  Mostly the players manipulate events from the shadows to achieve various goals and score points thereby. The general idea is to plunge the realms clustered around the Alamber Sea into war.

  War to weaken a land until it can no longer withstand a dragon conqueror. Or until it finds itself in such desperate straits that it will embrace a dragon protector.

  But I warn you. You won’t like it very much.

  BROTHERHOOD OF THE GRIFFON

  Book I

  The Captive Flame

  Book II

  Whisper of Venom

  Book III

  The Spectral Blaze

  Book IV

  Rival Blades

  (February 2012)

  THE HAUNTED LANDS

  Book I

  Unclean

  Book II

  Undead

  Book III

  Unholy

  Anthology

  Realms of the Dead

  ALSO BY RICHARD LEE BYERS

  R.A. SALVATORE’S

  WAR OF THE SPIDER QUEEN

  Book I

  Dissolution

  THE YEAR OF ROGUE DRAGONS

  Book I

  The Rage

  Book II

  The Rite

  Book III

  The Ruin

  SEMBIA:

  GATEWAY TO THE REALMS

  The Halls of Stormweather

  Shattered Mask

  THE PRIESTS

  Queen of the Depths

  THE ROGUES

  The Black Bouquet

  Brotherhood of the Griffon

  Book III

  THE SPECTRAL BLAZE

  ©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, D&D, FORGOTTEN REALMS, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Cover art by: Kekai Kotaki

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-5920-4

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  ASIA, PACIFIC, & LATIN AMERICA Hasbro UK Ltd

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  Visit our web site at www.wizards.com

  v3.1

  FOR JAMIE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Susan Morris and Phil Athans for all their help and support.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: 15 Flamerule, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)

  Chapter One: 26–30 Flamerule, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Two: 3–6 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Three: 6–10 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Four: 10–14 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Five: 15–19 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Six: 20–22 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Seven: 23–24 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Eight: 25 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Nine: 27 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Ten: 28 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Eleven: 29–30 Eleasis, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Twelve: 5–6 Eleint, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Thirteen: 7 Eleint, the Year of the Ageless One

  Chapter Fourteen: 7 Eleint, the Year of the Ageless One

  Epilogue: 7 Eleint–5 Marpenoth, the Year of the Ageless One

  About the Author

  Welcome to Faerûn, a land of magic and intrigue, brutal violence and divine compassion, where gods have ascended and died, and mighty heroes have risen to fight terrifying monsters. Here, millennia of warfare and conquest have shaped dozens of unique cultures, raised and leveled shining kingdoms and tyrannical empires alike, and left long forgotten, horror-infested ruins in their wake.

  A LAND OF MAGIC

  When the goddess of magic was murdered, a magical plague of blue fire—the Spellplague—swept across the face of Faerûn, killing some, mutilating many, and imbuing a rare few with amazing supernatural abilities. The Spellplague forever changed the nature of magic itself, and seeded the land with hidden wonders and bloodcurdling monstrosities.

  A LAND OF DARKNESS

  The threats Faerûn faces are legion. Armies of undead mass in Thay under the brilliant but mad lich king Szass Tam. Treacherous dark elves plot in the Underdark in the service of their cruel and fickle goddess, Lolth. The Abolethic Sovereignty, a terrifying hive of inhuman slave masters, floats above the Sea of Fallen Stars, spreading chaos and destruction. And the Empire of Netheril, armed with magic of unimaginable power, prowls Faerûn in flying fortresses, sowing discord to their own incalculable ends.

  A LAND OF HEROES

  But Faerûn is not without hope. Heroes have emerged to fight the growing tide of darkness. Battle-scarred rangers bring their notched blades to bear against marauding hordes of orcs. Lowly street rats match wits with demons for the fate of cities. Inscrutable tiefling warlocks unite with fierce elf warriors to rain fire and steel upon monstrous enemies. And valiant servants of merciful gods forever struggle against the darkness.

  A LAND OF

  UNTOLD ADVENTURE

  P

  R

  O

  L

  O

  G

  U

  E

  15 FLAMERULE, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

  Cera Eurthos and her two companions had locked the spirit of Alasklerbanbastos, the Great Bone Wyrm, in the charred, rotting corpse of Calabastasingavor, a younger, smaller blue dragon. Yet the undead horror at the bottom of the big, open grave seemed scarcely less menacing for that. He gave a rasping laugh, and despite herself, Cera flinched.

  Alert for any hint that the dracolich was about to attack, Aoth Fezim had his glowing blue eyes locked on him. Yet somehow he sensed Cera’s pang of fear, reached out, and gave her forearm a reassuring squeeze.

  “All right, human,” Alasklerbanbastos said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. But I warn you. You won’t like it very much.”

  A surge of excitement washed Cera’s fear—although not her caution—away. Ever since Chessenta’s troubles began, she, Aoth, and
their allies had sensed hidden forces acting beneath the surface of events. Amaunator had tasked her, his priestess, with solving the puzzle. The mission had taken her through captivity, torture, and constant danger. But it appeared she’d groped her way to the truth at last.

  “We dragons,” Alasklerbanbastos continued, “are playing a game.”

  “Please,” said Gaedynn Ulraes. He was as tall and lanky as Aoth was short and burly, and his impeccably brushed and combed hair gleamed even in the pale moonlight, although night had dulled it from coppery red to gray. “We didn’t haul your scaly, decaying arse back into the mortal world so you could put us off with trite metaphors. Cera, give him another dose of your light.”

  Cera focused her will on the black, egg-shaped gem in her hand. At certain moments it looked solid, and at others like a shadow with tiny blue lightning bolts flickering inside it. Mostly it was cold, although occasionally it gave her a sudden hot sting. But however it looked and felt, it was ever the source of the dracolich’s immortality and his tether to earthly existence. And she, Aoth, and the wizards in his service had altered it so she could infuse it with Amaunator’s holy sunlight and wrack Alasklerbanbastos with pain.

  “That’s unnecessary!” Alasklerbanbastos snapped. Sparks, a petty manifestation of the lightning that was part of a blue dragon’s essence, jumped and popped on his torn and slimy hide. “I’m speaking the truth as plainly as I can, whether or not you have the wit to understand it. We wyrms are literally playing a game.”

  Aoth pressed a fingertip to his mail-covered chest. Cera assumed he was activating the magic in one of the tattoos that covered his body and face. Then, spear held ready, he stepped closer to the pit. “Explain,” he said.

  “In primordial times,” Alasklerbanbastos said, “dragons ruled Faerûn.”

  Gaedynn snorted. “Maybe you should skip ahead a little.”

  Aoth raised a hand to tell the archer not to interrupt.

  “The problem,” the dracolich continued, “was that we were as contentious a people then as we are now. We often disputed among ourselves, largely because we wanted to dominate one another as we did the lower orders. Yet if we had simply set about slaughtering our fellows whenever we felt so inclined, the resulting chaos might have threatened our control of the lesser races. It might even have brought us to the brink of extinction.”

  “And wouldn’t that have been a pity,” Gaedynn murmured. Perhaps that was unwise, because wyrms had notoriously sharp senses, and Alasklerbanbastos shot him a glare before pressing onward with his tale.

  “Fortunately our ancestors found a way to manage the struggle. They vied for dominance by manipulating lesser beings like pawns on a game board, and scored points when their agents eliminated the minions of a rival.”

  Aoth frowned. “You say ‘manipulating.’ But if they ruled kingdoms, couldn’t they just order their subjects to go out and fight for them?”

  “They could,” Alasklerbanbastos replied, “but the game was played on multiple levels. Players scored points for guile and subtlety as well as simple success. For that reason, even a dragon’s chief agents—his exarchs—often didn’t understand the true purpose of their various missions.”

  “And this actually worked?” asked Aoth.

  “So we are told,” said the dracolich, and to Cera’s surprise, there was a hint of amusement in his hiss of a voice. “You understand that, ancient as I must seem to mayflies like you, I wasn’t there to witness it myself. The dragon kings still fought outright wars on occasion but not the endless, devastating wars that might otherwise have been.

  “Then the madness of the Rage changed the face of the world,” Alasklerbanbastos continued. “Dragons lost their thrones and other things besides, including knowledge of xorvintaal, the Great Game.”

  “But now the Rage is over,” said Aoth, “or at least that’s what the stories say. A song dragon named Karasendrieth and her friends figured out how to cure it to keep you wyrms from tearing the world apart.”

  “Indeed,” said Alasklerbanbastos, “and with that cloud lifted from our minds, we remembered that we are the rightful lords of all Faerûn. But we didn’t know how to reclaim our thrones. A few of us possess armies but none powerful enough to overrun the continent. And the possibility of conquest confronted us with the same problem as the dragons of old. Who among us would be an emperor, and who a mere duke or count? How could we decide such things except by the wholesale butchery of one another?”

  “Let me guess,” said Gaedynn, a crooked smile on his lips. “Just when you needed it most, somebody rediscovered your nasty little game.”

  “Yes,” said Alasklerbanbastos. “Karasendrieth’s song cycle says that her companion, the vampire drake Brimstone, perished in the final battle with Sammaster. But unbeknownst to her or any other, he actually survived, and stayed in the ruined citadel to search for secrets. Ultimately Tiamat led him to the rules—the Precepts—of the Great Game. And now he’s returned to share it with his kin.”

  “And this—everything that’s been happening—is it?” asked Aoth. For a moment, the battle magic stored inside his spear made red light flow along the razor edges of the head. “It doesn’t seem to have kept many dragons from getting killed. Including you.”

  Alasklerbanbastos shifted his leathery wings, and Cera caught a whiff of his rotten stench. Some of the dirt that had covered him smelled like the bottom of the grave. “The rules don’t forbid dragon to fight dragon in all circumstances. Not if one issues a challenge and the other accepts. And you surely know how Tchazzar and I hate one another.”

  “And once you agreed to come out and fight, your dragon underlings had no choice but to do it too.” Gaedynn grinned. “Bad luck for them.”

  “Something like that,” said the undead blue. “Don’t imagine you can truly comprehend the Precepts. It takes a dragon’s intellect and long years of study.”

  Gaedynn’s grin widened. “I’m guessing that means you don’t understand them, either. You have to take this Brimstone’s word for it as to what they really mean. Interesting.”

  Without so much as a twitch to hint at his intentions and fast as a striking viper despite his broken, tattered from, Alasklerbanbastos scrambled up the side of the pit. Lined with fangs the size of short swords, his jaws gaped as he lunged at Gaedynn.

  The archer leaped backward, and the reptile’s teeth clashed shut on empty air. Gaedynn nocked an arrow as he continued to retreat. But nimble as he was, the dracolich was faster and closed the distance before he could draw the fletchings back to his ear. The wyrm raised a forefoot to rake and stamp.

  Aoth bellowed a word of power, and the point of his spear burst into flame. He rammed it into Alasklerbanbastos’s neck, and the dragon froze.

  It lasted for only a heartbeat, though. Then with a fast, sinuous motion bewildering to the eye, he whipped his neck free of the burning point and twisted his frilled, wedge-shaped head around to glare at Aoth. White light flickered in his mouth, and a smell like an oncoming storm suffused the air as he prepared to spit lightning.

  Then Cera set herself aglow with golden radiance and stabbed a hot, dazzling shaft of it into the phylactery like a dagger. Unlike her companions, she didn’t make her living from war and fighting, and she didn’t react to threats as quickly as they did. But the trials of the past several tendays had sharpened her reflexes, and Aoth and Gaedynn had bought her enough time to bring the Keeper’s sacred power to bear.

  Alasklerbanbastos burst into flame and convulsed. His agony shook the ground, and Aoth and Gaedynn retreated, staggering a little, lest a pounding wing or lashing tail pulp them without the reptile’s even intending it.

  A part of Cera wanted to let the fire burn until it reduced the dracolich to ash. Any sunlady or sunlord would have felt the same. But, mindful of her purpose, she took a steadying breath then brandished her gilded mace. The flames died.

  Just as they did, two winged shapes came swooping down from the starry sky. They were Jet and Eider
, Aoth and Gaedynn’s griffons, rushing to protect their masters.

  Black as his name, Jet leveled off. He shared a psychic bond with Aoth, and Cera assumed that Aoth had used it to tell him not to attack. Jet screeched to Eider, and the other griffon pulled out of her dive as well.

  Alasklerbanbastos lay sprawled on the ground, his body smoking, bits of it sizzling like bacon in a frying pan, filling the warm, summer air with a foul smell.

  “We can go on like this all night,” Aoth told him.

  The dracolich dragged himself to his feet. Cera suspected his pride wouldn’t allow him to stay down in front of his captors. “You have me at a disadvantage,” he said. “I acknowledge that. But I will not abide insolence. I will not be mocked.”

  “Gaedynn,” said Aoth, “don’t tease the dragon.”

  The archer heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I never get to have any fun.”

  Aoth lowered his spear but kept it pointed in Alasklerbanbastos’s general direction. “You were explaining how this xorvintaal is the answer to all your problems.”

  “Yes,” the dragon said. “The open duel between Tchazzar and me was something of an anomaly. Mostly the players manipulate events from the shadows to achieve various goals and score points thereby. The general idea is to plunge the realms clustered around the Alamber Sea into war.”

  “War to weaken a land until it can no longer withstand a dragon conqueror,” Gaedynn said.

  “Or until it finds itself in such desperate straits that it will embrace a dragon protector,” Cera said, “as Chessenta embraced Tchazzar.”

  “And a big part of the first phase of the game focuses on isolating and breaking Tymanther,” said Aoth. “Because the dragonborn hate wyrms. They’ll pose a constant threat to your plans until you kill them or bring them to heel.”

  The dracolich grunted. “You understand,” he said, “insofar as you’re capable of understanding.”

  “Lucky us,” said Gaedynn. “Now what in the Night Hunter’s name are we supposed to do about it?”

  * * * * *